Day: June 8, 2012

Listen to this teacher from Wisconsin in the clip below right before the recall election of Governor Scott Walker. It is these kinds of public employees that have driven up the cost of education at every school in the United States and is what they more often than not seek to teach our youth.

It is those kinds of employees who have created a situation in my home school district of Lakota that are devastating for the parents sending their children to the school. At Lakota over $160 million dollars of tax payer money is already allocated toward educating the students of the community, however, according to the teachers union, that’s not enough. The average wage per employee at Lakota is $63K per year and makes up approximately 80% of the total budget. Yet the Lakota School Board along with superintendent Mantia has said that they don’t have enough money, so they seek to twist the arm of the tax payers in a hope to pass a school levy. They do so at Lakota by cutting busing for students, and have been charging to participate in sports programs. This has enraged many in the community who expect participation in sports to be part of the public education experience. The fees at Lakota during the school year of 2012 will be the highest in the State of Ohio at $550 per student per sport with no cap for families. You can read in more detail the article from the Cincinnati Enquirer about this issue in case you missed it.

I have spoke with many parents in Lakota, many of them upset that the cost of passing a school levy for them individually is far less than paying $550 per sport for their child. If the parents have 2 children in school and each of them play two sports, that particular family is out over $2000 a year, so they have said to me that they will vote in favor of a school levy so they can save money, even though they don’t agree with the politics.

I have told these parents that the system is rigged this way by the OSBA to push school boards like the one at Lakota to place the financial pain back on the parents so that union contracts can be satisfied without interruption. I told them that if they allow themselves to vote yes for a school levy because they want to save the $2000 in fees, then they are simply tools of organized labor.

The cause of the school fees is not lack of money; it is mismanagement of the money given to the districts by the tax payers. Cutting sports is proportional to the cuts of busing in that sports costs are somewhere between 1% and 2% of the total budget. When a school board cuts their support of funding sports, they do so in order to cover the expense of heavily padded labor contracts, and they hope the imposition on parents will force tax increases on the community to cover the labor demands.

In Southwest Ohio 82 percent of the 49 school districts are charging pay-to-play fees for high school sports yet just across the river in Kentucky such fees are rare. The strategy is designed by the Ohio School Board Association to extort money through financial hardship to force tax increases. In Kentucky union membership is not required, but in Ohio it is. Public schools in Ohio are a closed shop, and this forces labor costs up through collective bargaining who seeks to gobble up all the tax dollars for their union interests. This leaves no money left for sports, leaving children struggling to pay for their fees. It’s a dirty trick organized by teacher unions to manipulate taxpayers, and it’s rather disgusting.

The public sector unions at their heart are socialist organizations intent on open communism. That is why so many of the radical teachers who advocate leftist policies are drawn to big labor public sector jobs, because it keeps them out of competitive work environments which is the only place that communism works– in theory—in the minds of the extreme liberal, in their utmost fantasies. Communism in real life does not work, and it never works—and that is what the cause of the sports fees are. Parents are forced to accept small bits of communism from radical teachers because they don’t want to pay the extraordinary fees to play sports. The extortion tactic forces upon the family trying to give their children the best of everything, higher taxes that go on forever, so to avoid the school fees they must accept the taxes. It’s a dishonest practice that should be viewed with the same anger that the theft by a common criminal is viewed, because the intentions are the same—theft, extortion, and coercion through financial torture. What else is it?

Personally, I do not want to pay for teachers who think the way that educators shown in the video above think. I would seek to terminate their employment from my district because they are just creating trouble for our nation to solve later with incorrectly educated students. Many political looters speak of the need for education, but they always leave out the most important part of education, and that is getting a “quality” education. A district that does not manage the extraordinary taxes that the Lakota district already pays is yielding to the radicals of the unions at the expense of parents and children. School boards are not in pursuit of quality, but simply a lottery ticket of hope that if the district pays for a teacher that they are going to get the desired results. Most often, they do not. All too often the money buys a left-winged radical intent on bringing communism to the minds of our children and teaching them failed economic policies, and that is not acceptable.

The proper reaction to the extortion measure of school fees is to force the district to pay the money where the district desires it. If the voters wish for their money to be spent on busing, then the school board should do that. If the desire of voters is to have their money spent on sports, then the school board has an obligation to do so. But what has happened at Lakota, and 82% of all schools in Southern Ohio is they take direction from the OSBA to protect the labor contracts of teachers with gold plated benefits that the tax payers do not enjoy themselves, and that is why the children and their families are made to suffer. There is no other reason, and the public reaction to these extortion methods are the task of our day to define for generations to come. Appeasement today only leads to tyranny tomorrow, and for the parents who would rather pay the tax than the fee, that is exactly what they are choosing, which their children are watching—and learning.

The solution is not to yield and allow the mismanagement to occur, because it does not solve the problem. Letting it go, only delays the problem for some future time for a future family, which is how we arrived at this situation in the first place.